allyoucanupload

"No cuffs, no pleats...just pants"   

We developed an image hosting service called allyoucanupload - please check it out and tell me what you think. 

It's a front end to a brand spanking new storage system that we just built.  We call the back end system "Haystack" and I can post on that later if people are interested.  It's pretty neat.  took a few months of hard core systems and operations engineering.  much thanks go to Matt, Paul, Rodolphe, MKaz,  and Jim.  Haystack will soon serve hundreds of millions of Webshots member photos.  (we have over 375,000,000)

But allyoucanupload is what this post is supposed to be about.  We built it to test haystack and because it wasn't too much extra work, we built it to serve those people who want their pants with neither cuffs nor pleats.  Credit goes to James Park, who joined us last year from start up HeyPix! with two of his friends. James is ably taking over Webshots product development and you'll see more stuff from James in our upcoming relaunch.

allyoucanupload doesn't have a lot of things - no albums, no photo streams, no profile page, no comments, no friends.  It was built to do one thing very well - store and serve images (images right now).

As those of you who take and share digital photos, you may contribute to photo sharing sites like webshots and flick, but we know that you email them, you IM them, and you might post to your blog or myspace, livejournal, metafilter or other site. 

do you really want to upload the same photo multiple times?  we didn't either.

things allyoucanupload.com doesn't have:

• no registration required
• no ads on the pages seen by the uploader
• no limit on the size of the photos you can upload
• no limit on the total amount of images you can upload

please try it out.  in our perf testing it tests muliple times faster than the competition (flickr,photobucket, imageshack).  of course they have tons of usage, but so does webshots.  we'd love to see some real world testing and feedback on the new service.  all comments are welcome.  we've got some ideas for additions but we thought we'd launch with just the basics.

oh yeah - here's a nice picture of some tulip petals by my wife to put some colour on this page.

Comments

[Nick Wilder]

Congrats on the new system! Sounds pretty amazing and I'm of course interested in how it works! What about storing the URL's for me (assign me a random ID and stick it in a cookie, and connect my uploads to that ID). I would think I'd lose the URL's provided, and have to re-upload the photos.

[Martin]

Good idea - Narendra also suggested an easy web form to email yourself the links.

we'll figure out how soon we can implement both. thanks.

Hope you are doing well.

Haystack is *very* cool - wil follow up with another blog post with details from the people who built it.

[Ian Holsman]

congrats Martin, it's good to see haystack being used like this.

one problem.. it doesn't seem to like PNG files.

I'm posting this here.. as I couldn't find a support link on the site!

the image in question : http://zyons.com/theme/zyon/blue_triad/logo.png

[martin]

Thanks Ian - good to hear from you - we'll check it out. it's supposed to work on png files.

[adam]

i am interested, could you post more on haystack? thanks

[Jack]

Martin, congrats on replicating what ImageShack has released three years ago. :) Fyi, some interesting reading material for you: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060516/20060516005451.html?.v=1

-Jack

[martin]

Hi Jack - many congratulations on imageshack's success.

Competition is good for for all of us, and especially good if we each end up delivering better services for users.

[Misha Govshteyn]

Sounds like an interesting storage challenge. Could you tell us more about Haystack?

[martin]

Re: Haystack - I'll get together with some of the engineers who designed and built Haystack and put together a post later this week.

[DG]

Hi Martin,

Please take a look at this post of mine:- http://www.roks.xmgfree.com/blog/2006/05/30/cnet%e2%80%99s-allyoucanupload/

I would like to see, if it is poosible, Image uploading through URL, like the Imageshack has.

Reagrds,
DG...

[martin]

DG - thanks for your suggestion - will discuss with the dev team. btw - I tried to post a comment to your blog and got an error.

[Ian Danforth]

This is a crosspost from Techcrunch in case you didn't want to scroll 60+ messages.

Martin:

You need a small windows app that adds “right click to upload” functionality to all images.

And possibly provides a minimalist drag and drop to upload feature.

This app should not require log-in.

It should store urls for the user.

The homepage is ugly, http://imagesocket.com/ is much nicer.

If you need to let people upload more than one photo at once, you add a script like Gmail’s attachment script which adds as many upload slots as you need, and you urge the download of the above mentioned drag and drop app.

Further suggestions:

I hope you expand this service to hosting other file types.

www.badongo.com already does this, but they are very sketchy. (Read the EULA for their download app if you want a laugh)

Good luck on the new venture, please take the succinctness of my comments as a mark of respect. You sound very willing to think about suggested features and I appreciate that.

-Ian D.

[cyen]

Just found your service via TechCrunch and tried it out. very simple and easy to use. Congrats. One minor problem... I used the link for the blogs, and tried to post it to my blogger account. It came back with an error that there were "illegal commands" (or characters, something like that). I ended up using the "direct link" and it all worked fine.
Good luck. I will shout the news from my blog.

[DG]

Martin - Thanks for your prompt reply, musch appreciated.

This is the spirit, I admire. But hardly found with people.

About your comment:- I got your comment, it was in the moderation. I think, sometimes back I had disable moeration notification. I will check this on my comments and will rectify.

Thanks once again.

Hope to see more best services soon!

Regards,
DG...

[DG]

Hi Martin,

The upload site does not respond. After feeding file, it gets freezed and nothing comes up.

DG...

[martin]

DG: I just tried it and it's running very fast and smooth, and checked with our ops group - everything looks 5x5.

you are using imageshack on your most recent blog posts. - is this because of performance issues that you're experiencing with us?

[Graham Toal]

Neat idea. A bit like the old Cambridge File Server from the 70's. ( http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/32/35918/01702761.pdf?tp=&isnumber=35918&arnumber=1702761 )
- you put a file in, get an opaque capability token (in this case, URL) out, and keeping an index of the capability tokens is up to you.

Just one problem - how do you delete something? There doesn't seem to be a special 'owner' token - just the same URL that you have to hand out to viewers... (OK, not the exact same URL, but it's trivial to map back from the jpg image URL to the main acknowlegement page - http://aycu06.webshots.com/image/XXXXX/YYYYYYY_rs.jpg -> http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/b/YYYYYY ) so even retrofitting a 'delete' option on the master page is not a possibility for tokens already handed out!

Also if images are not viewed for a long time, are they deleted? If they are, what about people who *want* archival storage of seldom-read images (for example my computer history project has about 4Gb of large bitmap scans of historical material - for which this site would make ideal online storage)

If someone loses their URL, is their image out there in limbo forever? There seems to be no way to find them. Even a search by IP and/or date would be a start. Are they garbage collected - or do you just grow your disk space indefinitely?

What about takedown notices? Illegal content? People using steganography to use the unlimited storage as file storage? You probably don't even need stego to store files in the images - I bet there's room in the JPEG info/comment fields.

If you think that's unlikely, look at how soon someone hacked up a file-system interface using emails stored on GMail!

This service seems like a great hack by programmers, but I suspect that once the suits realise what you've done, it's not going to be such an open system as it is now... I bet the anonymity is the first thing to go.

G

[Graham Toal]

I see I wasn't the first person to think of doing backups via embedding data in the exif fields of photographs :-) ... http://www.dansdata.com/gz063.htm

[Jim k.]

http://pspgames247.com